5 ms·

The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man

90 points by jcastro 12y ago

shock 12y ago
I wish I had this 5 years ago when I was building a dev cluster.
foxpc 12y ago
The name is somewhat unlucky as The Orange Box[1] already exists. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box
- dustinkirkland 12y ago
  Indeed! It's a bit of an homage to one of the greatest video games of all time, applying it literally to our own bright orange cloud kit in a box ;-)
  - astrowilliam 12y ago
    Does it come with a free crowbar?
    - wmf 12y ago
      No, Crowbar is from Dell. Ubuntu uses MaaS. :-)
- wildpeaks 12y ago
  Given the use of that name and "Free Man" in the title, I suspect they're already aware of it and that it's an intentional reference.
- madeofpalk 12y ago
  I thought it was on purpose, esp. with the main character of the main game is 'Freeman'
- Argorak 12y ago
  Either by coincidence or by a very elaborate troll, the trash boxes in Berlin are also officially called "Orange Box": http://bilder.t-online.de/b/46/06/03/00/id_46060300/tid_da/index.jpg http://bilder.t-online.de/b/46/06/03/00/id_46060300/tid_da/i...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tzabal 12y ago
Very nice. I like the idea of this "HDK" as the post mentions. It would be useful in case that you want to conduct an experiment and use this HDK as your platform, and provide an easy way for others to fully understand your environment and test your results, eliminating any other factors. In the same spirit, recently I found LittleFe [1]. I think it is now abandoned (based on the fact the the copyright message is still 2012 and the latest item in news was posted in March 2012), but it seems to be a good project. [1] http://littlefe.net http://littlefe.net
opendais 12y ago
Does anyone else wish they had doubled the number of drives and used RAID? 10 nodes @ 1 disk per node = 1 drive loss kills the node It seems you can only buy 'extra' disks for 4 of the 10 nodes, which makes disk redundancy across all nodes impossible.
- niemeyer 12y ago
  These boxes were created mainly for development, experimentation, and mobility. More disks would mean more heat, cost, size, weight.
  - opendais 12y ago
    Fair enough. :) I suppose I just think its neat and a production-ready version would be nice.
    - jcastro 12y ago
      Get a few of them and use Ceph. :) No quite what you want, but it'll do the job.
      - opendais 12y ago
        If only my hobby budget could afford two of them :(
        tacticus 12y ago
        You could run ceph within the cluster of 10. It is certainly enough to run a small cluster
- tealeg 12y ago
  Well - RAID is more or a traditional architecture solution than a cloud one. A cloud storage solution like Ceph provides redundancy across nodes, and I've even read that they strongly discourage the use of RAID. Still, the orange box is a homogenous architecture that can be used flexibly as a training and introduction tool - I've not heard anyone suggest you run it as your production cloud. If you go and spec a real cloud you'll find vendors will provide different configuration for designated storage and compute nodes.
HCIdivision17 12y ago
Is there any estimate of the cost of this unit? This is the sort of thing that would make it very easy to set up and run in an industrial facility. Normally we don't have access to software devs, but could really use a solid hackable platform for process analysis. Having a single unit by a brand name would make requsitioning a system far easier from a Purchasing standpoint.
- popey 12y ago
  You can buy them direct from the manufacturer, Tranquil PC. http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-box/ http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-box/ £7,575.00 is the base price.
  - HCIdivision17 12y ago
    Ah, thanks! I feel a little silly having overlooked that link. Pretty nice, considering the minimal cooling needs and raw power. I feel like this is exactly the sort of rugged, simplified system needed for use in a plant.
    - iamtew 12y ago
      We use Poweredge VRTX systems in our branch offices to run minor stuff. It's not too pricey compared to this Orange Box and it's an easy way to replace what in some cases could be almost a full cabinet of systems in to 5U space. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd Edit: Oh yeah and it supports ECC memory, to address the comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
addandsubtract 12y ago
Reminds me of the Protonet[1] box. [1] https://protonet.info/en/product/ https://protonet.info/en/product/
sargun 12y ago
So, I wouldn't use this box because it doesn't ECC Memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory). Google some years ago did a study on DRAM errors in the wild, in order to determine if there was an actual need for ECC in modern datacenters / distributed computing applications (http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf). The short summary was that yes, they did need it. Given that the processors (http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-Core-i5-3427U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-Core-i5-3427U-Proc...) that are on these NUCs don't support ECC, I would probably avoid these units for any real workload. It bums me a out a little bit that there is only a 1G fabric on these, when each board has two mini-PCIe ports, which is at 2Gbit/sec, and make a ring topology out of them, or using a PCIe switch. Another interesting approach could have been a usb 3 fabric.
- jcastro 12y ago
  Yeah these aren't really intended for real workloads, it's to spin up a team of people with a self contained box that replicates what a real OpenStack deployment would look like. So the idea there is you play with this is two days of training and then two weeks for your team to learn OpenStack while you're getting the real hardware ready, etc.
ossreality 12y ago
Can I have the hardware and not use Juju on it? Give me this, plus Flynn, plus Camlistore and I'll be in heaven.
le_meta 12y ago
Finally, I always wanted a botnet and spaceheater in one. Sure, this is about 10 times what the actual value is, but no price is too great to pay for Freedom.
mey 12y ago
Is there a similar designed solution that combines say 10 cheaper SOC (raspberry pi's?) and a 100mb network? I would love to play with clustering setups at home, but almost ~$13k USD is way over my hobby budget. My only option currently is really visualization for learning.
- jcastro 12y ago
  Check out the Banana Pi's: http://www.bananapi.org/#about http://www.bananapi.org/#about
anxman 12y ago
Am I the only one who thought this was going to be a Half Life 3 announcement?

90 points by jcastro 12y ago

shock 12y ago

I wish I had this 5 years ago when I was building a dev cluster.

foxpc 12y ago

The name is somewhat unlucky as The Orange Box[1] already exists. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box

dustinkirkland 12y ago
Indeed! It's a bit of an homage to one of the greatest video games of all time, applying it literally to our own bright orange cloud kit in a box ;-)
- astrowilliam 12y ago
  Does it come with a free crowbar?
  - wmf 12y ago
    No, Crowbar is from Dell. Ubuntu uses MaaS. :-)
wildpeaks 12y ago
Given the use of that name and "Free Man" in the title, I suspect they're already aware of it and that it's an intentional reference.
madeofpalk 12y ago
I thought it was on purpose, esp. with the main character of the main game is 'Freeman'
Argorak 12y ago
Either by coincidence or by a very elaborate troll, the trash boxes in Berlin are also officially called "Orange Box": http://bilder.t-online.de/b/46/06/03/00/id_46060300/tid_da/index.jpg http://bilder.t-online.de/b/46/06/03/00/id_46060300/tid_da/i...

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tzabal 12y ago

Very nice. I like the idea of this "HDK" as the post mentions. It would be useful in case that you want to conduct an experiment and use this HDK as your platform, and provide an easy way for others to fully understand your environment and test your results, eliminating any other factors. In the same spirit, recently I found LittleFe [1]. I think it is now abandoned (based on the fact the the copyright message is still 2012 and the latest item in news was posted in March 2012), but it seems to be a good project. [1] http://littlefe.net http://littlefe.net

opendais 12y ago

Does anyone else wish they had doubled the number of drives and used RAID? 10 nodes @ 1 disk per node = 1 drive loss kills the node It seems you can only buy 'extra' disks for 4 of the 10 nodes, which makes disk redundancy across all nodes impossible.

niemeyer 12y ago
These boxes were created mainly for development, experimentation, and mobility. More disks would mean more heat, cost, size, weight.
- opendais 12y ago
  Fair enough. :) I suppose I just think its neat and a production-ready version would be nice.
  - jcastro 12y ago
    Get a few of them and use Ceph. :) No quite what you want, but it'll do the job.
    - opendais 12y ago
      If only my hobby budget could afford two of them :(
      - tacticus 12y ago
        You could run ceph within the cluster of 10. It is certainly enough to run a small cluster
tealeg 12y ago
Well - RAID is more or a traditional architecture solution than a cloud one. A cloud storage solution like Ceph provides redundancy across nodes, and I've even read that they strongly discourage the use of RAID. Still, the orange box is a homogenous architecture that can be used flexibly as a training and introduction tool - I've not heard anyone suggest you run it as your production cloud. If you go and spec a real cloud you'll find vendors will provide different configuration for designated storage and compute nodes.

HCIdivision17 12y ago

Is there any estimate of the cost of this unit? This is the sort of thing that would make it very easy to set up and run in an industrial facility. Normally we don't have access to software devs, but could really use a solid hackable platform for process analysis. Having a single unit by a brand name would make requsitioning a system far easier from a Purchasing standpoint.

popey 12y ago
You can buy them direct from the manufacturer, Tranquil PC. http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-box/ http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-box/ £7,575.00 is the base price.
- HCIdivision17 12y ago
  Ah, thanks! I feel a little silly having overlooked that link. Pretty nice, considering the minimal cooling needs and raw power. I feel like this is exactly the sort of rugged, simplified system needed for use in a plant.
  - iamtew 12y ago
    We use Poweredge VRTX systems in our branch offices to run minor stuff. It's not too pricey compared to this Orange Box and it's an easy way to replace what in some cases could be almost a full cabinet of systems in to 5U space. http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd Edit: Oh yeah and it supports ECC memory, to address the comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

addandsubtract 12y ago

Reminds me of the Protonet[1] box. [1] https://protonet.info/en/product/ https://protonet.info/en/product/

sargun 12y ago

So, I wouldn't use this box because it doesn't ECC Memory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory). Google some years ago did a study on DRAM errors in the wild, in order to determine if there was an actual need for ECC in modern datacenters / distributed computing applications (http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf). The short summary was that yes, they did need it. Given that the processors (http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-Core-i5-3427U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel-Core-i5-3427U-Proc...) that are on these NUCs don't support ECC, I would probably avoid these units for any real workload. It bums me a out a little bit that there is only a 1G fabric on these, when each board has two mini-PCIe ports, which is at 2Gbit/sec, and make a ring topology out of them, or using a PCIe switch. Another interesting approach could have been a usb 3 fabric.

jcastro 12y ago
Yeah these aren't really intended for real workloads, it's to spin up a team of people with a self contained box that replicates what a real OpenStack deployment would look like. So the idea there is you play with this is two days of training and then two weeks for your team to learn OpenStack while you're getting the real hardware ready, etc.

ossreality 12y ago

Can I have the hardware and not use Juju on it? Give me this, plus Flynn, plus Camlistore and I'll be in heaven.

le_meta 12y ago

Finally, I always wanted a botnet and spaceheater in one. Sure, this is about 10 times what the actual value is, but no price is too great to pay for Freedom.

mey 12y ago

Is there a similar designed solution that combines say 10 cheaper SOC (raspberry pi's?) and a 100mb network? I would love to play with clustering setups at home, but almost ~$13k USD is way over my hobby budget. My only option currently is really visualization for learning.

jcastro 12y ago
Check out the Banana Pi's: http://www.bananapi.org/#about http://www.bananapi.org/#about

anxman 12y ago

Am I the only one who thought this was going to be a Half Life 3 announcement?